Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
For the last few months now I’ve been poking fun at Donald Trump’s ostensible fixation with North Korea, going back even before the inauguration. I had concluded that Trump and Kim Jong Un had merely agreed to be each other’s boogeymen, each the other’s rationalization for gaudy defense spending. With Trump’s budget plans revealed – with the increase in military spending – it seems he should have no more use for North Korea. Yet, he keeps prattling on about them and, even more worrying; he keeps escalating the rhetoric he uses.
“’There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely,’” Trump told an interviewer from Reuters yesterday, who noted the president had installed a button on his desk that summoned an aide bearing a Coca-Cola when pressed.
“”We’d love to solve things diplomatically but it’s very difficult,’ he said,” Reuters reported.
Unasked, and unanswered, is the question “What is there to solve?”
Reuters didn’t seem to have much of an explanation either.
“Trump said he wanted to peacefully resolve a crisis that has bedeviled multiple U.S. presidents, a path that he and his administration are emphasizing by preparing a variety of new economic sanctions while not taking the military option off the table,” Reuters wrote
What crisis? No, seriously?
Let’s review:
North Korea is a shithole. Decades of centralized, state-planning of the economy via strict adherence to communism (yes, college kids, it is “real communism” they’re practicing there, as evidenced by chronic malnutrition among the peasants and lavish lifestyles for the rulers and military elite) has made North Korea 113th worldwide in nominal gross domestic product (By UN math), right between the economic and geopolitical powerhouses we know as Gabon and Brunei – Ivory Coast has nearly double the GDP as North Korea with about the same population, by way of comparison.
Militarily, the hermit kingdom is anemic. Yes, it boasts a massive army of ground troops and vehicles, but these are supported by a weak air force and a navy comprised mainly of littoral ships and submarines – they can’t mount an invasion of anything other than South Korea or neighboring China; suicide in either event.
Over the past many years they’ve managed to conduct a series of increasingly successful tests of nuclear devices – but of course detonating such a device is far different than being able to effectively mount it on a delivery system capable of reaching anywhere useful. As previously mentioned, they have no real air force, so, that leaves intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs) as the only possible means of delivery. While North Korea has had a few successful tests of rockets theoretically capable of reaching parts of the U.S., there remains no indication they’ve the ability to mount a nuclear warhead atop one.
Yet, it appears North Korea’s fledgling missile program is the entire rationalization for Trump’s fixation on the tin pot dictatorship.
“’The council must be prepared to impose additional and stronger sanctions on North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile programmes,’ he said,” Aljazeera quoted Trump as saying to 15 UN Security Council members on April 24.
“Trump said North Korea ‘is a real threat to the world’.
’North Korea is a big world problem and it’s a problem that we have to finally solve,’ he said. ‘People put blindfolds on for decades and now it’s time to solve the problem,’” the Aljazeera piece continued.
Again, what threat? And, why the urgency now?
Whatever the reason, Trump is working overtime to sell the North Korean threat, going as far as to deploy the U.S.-developed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system to South Korea and speeding up the timetable for it to be fully operational from the end of this year to “within days.”
“’These things are now in place, so you can connect them to get the operational capability from early on — that’s what ‘within days’ means.’” CNN quoted South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Moon Sang-kyun as saying.
Of course, Trump also wants South Korea to pay an estimated $1B bill for hosting THAAD, and has called for the renegotiation or termination of a free trade pact between the U.S. and Seoul that has the U.S. at a trade deficit with its ally.
Could this nuclear brinksmanship with the north just be a ploy to twist South Korea’s arm into agreeing on a new trade deal? As absurd as the idea sounds, it would at least somewhat explain why the U.S. and Trump are all of a sudden exaggerating the “threat” North Korea poses.
Or, is all this North Korea nonsense meant to distract from other problems and failings Trump and his regime are encountering?
Or, does Trump actually think he can berate Kim Jong Un into ending his nuclear ambitions, thereby allowing Trump to claim a massive diplomatic victory and look like some sort of genius elder statesman?
Is it a combination of all of the above factors – none of which alone even come close to justifying provoking war – or a different but equally foolish one I haven’t yet considered?
I can’t imagine North Korea has something the oligarchs really want; but one thing the oligarchs really don’t want is armed conflict in Southeast Asia at this point. So I suppose we serfs can take some solace in knowing that the unelected oligarchs who rule us all probably won’t let the figurehead they allow us to elect to screw up their schemes by getting the U.S. into a war with a piss-ant dictatorship on the opposite side of the globe. Sadly, however, we get to listen to said figurehead thump his chest and talk tough about it for the foreseeable future.
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